Something to Chew On: The Coastwise Slave Trade to Texas

Come lunch and learn with us! For our June Something to Chew On, our own Program & Education Coordinator, Katelyn Landry, will give a presentation about research she conducted while an undergraduate student at Rice University about the maritime trade of enslaved people into Texas via the Gulf Coast. 

Admission is $5 for non-members. Members should log in to receive free admission. Learn more about membership options here!

Feel free to bring your own lunch or order a boxed lunch through us. Go to this page to choose your lunch: https://www.ljhistory.org/product-page/something-to-chew-on-box-lunch. Lunch orders must be placed by 11:59 PM on Tuesday, June 13, 2023.

Synopsis: Katelyn will talk about what she and a team of scholars at Rice University have learned about thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans who were forcibly brought to Texas via the coastwise slave trade in the 19th century. She will also talking about their efforts to make this data publicly accessible on the Slave Voyages database. Slave Voyages.org is a free and globally accessible database that is the world’s largest repository of information regarding voyages of ships that carried enslaved people across the Atlantic from Africa and between points within the Americas. Although the database has been around for over two decades, Texas ports were not listed as ports involved in the traffic of enslaved people in either the trans-Atlantic or Intra-American trades. Additionally, there was very little personal information about enslaved individuals available on the website until now.

Speaker Bio:Katelyn is a public historian with a passion for bringing historically marginalized narratives of Texas history to light. She graduated magna cum laude from Rice University in May 2022 with a BA in History. She was a member of the SlaveVoyages research team at Rice and contributed to "Finding Texas on the SlaveVoyages Database," an exhibit about the coastwise slave trade to Texas funded by Fondren Library. She won the Ira and Patricia Gruber Award for Best Honors Thesis for her undergraduate thesis, Silences on the Strand: Contesting Public Memories of Slavery and Freedom in Galveston’s Civic Historical Landscape (1871-2021). She is also interested in historical archaeology and attended the Monticello-University of Virginia Archaeological Field School. She is currently working with the Lake Jackson Historical Association as Program & Education Coordinator.